As the coronavirus pandemic upended the U.S. health-care system, EmCare IAH Emergency Physicians, a Houston staffing company owned by private equity firm KKR, made a little-noticed request of the government: It applied for a $317,379 interest-free loan, Bloomberg News reported. KKR had for years paid lobbyists to fend off efforts to ban a practice known as surprise billing used by EmCare and other providers that has driven up the cost of health care. But that didn’t stop the U.S. Health and Human Services Department from approving the loan and almost 300 others totaling more than $60 million to subsidiaries of KKR-owned companies. Shut out from many coronavirus relief programs, private equity companies have found a back door at HHS, where they have borrowed at least $1.5 billion, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of more than 40,000 loans disclosed by the department. KKR has more than $58 billion of cash to invest. Health-care facilities owned by Apollo Global Management, which started the year with about $46 billion, received at least $500 million in HHS loans. And Cerberus Capital Management’s Steward Health Care System LLC, which threatened to close a hard-hit Pennsylvania hospital, received at least $400 million in loans. Last month Cerberus was working to quadruple the size of a fund to invest in distressed loans to $750 million.
